Million-dollar hair? OK, sure — but what do you call the biggest numbers in existence?

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You’ve probably heard about the football player Troy Polamalu whose long locks are, as of today, insured for $1,000,000 dollars. The silly stunt is just the chance we need to talk big — bigger than a million. How big? Let’s see how big.

A “million” is literally Latin for “a great thousand” (mille is “thousand,” -ion is “largeness” or “greatness.”) A “billion” is literally “two or twice millions,” (bi– is “two”), but convention interprets the word to mean “a thousand millions.” Ready for some messiness? There are two different meanings of a billion, the long and short scales. The simple answer is that the short scale predominates today, and the short scale version of a billion is one with nine zeros. A trillion has twelve.

Here’s where things become exciting. The so-called “standard dictionary numbers” are terms for numerals that go up to centillion, which is basically 1 followed by 303 zeros. Here’s a fun number: quattuordecillion, or 1 followed by 45 zeros.

At this point, the dictionary stops including numerals. You are now entering googol territory. The legend goes that mathematician Edward Kasner asked his nine-year-old son to think of the name for a very big number. His reply is now famous. A googol is equal to 1 followed by 100 zeros. A googolplex is 1 followed by a googol of zeros. Beyond that, we are in pretty abstract territory.

Contrary to what you may have been told, infinity is not a number, it is a quality or concept: “the assumed limit of a sequence, series, etc., that increases without bound.”